[Ace7X]

yes, someone gave them to me.

Since we all know there will be short story competitions, I thought I would try and post some wisdom that i have found on other writing sites. Ive tried to compress it a bit and make it a bit easier to understand for those of you all who have not been writing long.

What is a Short Story?

A short story:

* Gets off to a fast start.
* Generally has a limited number of characters and scenes.
* Starts as close to the conclusion as possible.
* Frequently deals with only one problem.
* Uses only the detail necessary for understanding the situation.
* Usually covers just a short time period.

* Make lists. Sketch out the characters, plot, emotional tone, and so forth -- without slowing down to organize your ideas into sentences and paragraphs. You might list things you associate with school, sensations you feel that make you happy, or people that you admire. A story starts to develop around your list, and if you change the words around (which will be a lot easier than moving complete sentences and paragraphs around), the idea of the story begins to change too.
* Develop a list of events. Think about distressing, unusual, or difficult periods in your own life. Pick some of these events and write a paragraph about each one.
* Try clustering. Choose a word that is your main subject, write it in the middle of the page and circle it. For a few minutes, free-associate by writing around your main word any word that comes to mind--action, image, part of speech, or abstraction. Circle the words you have written and draw lines and arrows between words that seem connected.

In order to develop a living, breathing, multi-faceted character, it is important to know way more about the character than you will ever use in the story.

Imagining all these details will help you get to know your character, but your reader probably won't need to know much more than the most important things in four areas:

* Appearance. Gives your reader a visual understanding of the character.
* Action. Show the reader what kind of person your character is, by describing actions rather than simply listing adjectives.
* Speech. Develop the character as a person -- don't merely have your character announce important plot details.
* Thought. Bring the reader into your character's mind, to show them your character's unexpressed memories, fears, and hopes.

Point of Views

First Person. The story is told from the view of "I." The narrator is either the protagonist (main character) and directly affected by unfolding events, or the narrator is a secondary character telling the story revolving around the protagonist. This is a good choice for beginning writers because it is the easiest to write.

Second Person. The story is told directly to "you", with the reader as a participant in the action.

Third Person. The story tells what "he", "she," or "it" does. The third-person narrator's perspective can be limited (telling the story from one character's viewpoint) or omniscient (where the narrator knows everything about all of the characters).

Setting includes the time, location, context, and atmosphere where the plot takes place.

* Remember to combine setting with characterization and plot.

* Include enough detail to let your readers picture the scene but only details that actually add something to the story. (For example, do not describe Mary locking the front door, walking across the yard, opening the garage door, putting air in her bicycle tires, getting on her bicycle--none of these details matter except that she rode out of the driveway without looking down the street.)

* Use two or more senses in your descriptions of setting.

* Rather than feed your readers information about the weather, population statistics, or how far it is to the grocery store, substitute descriptive details so your reader can experience the location the way your characters do.

Plot Details

Plot is what happens, the storyline, the action. Jerome Stern says it is how you set up the situation, where the turning points of the story are, and what the characters do at the end of the story.

A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance. -Jane Burroway

Understanding these story elements for developing actions and their end results will help you plot your next short story.

* Explosion or "Hook." A thrilling, gripping, stirring event or problem that grabs the reader's attention right away.
* Conflict. A character versus the internal self or an external something or someone.
* Exposition. Background information required for seeing the characters in context.
* Complication. One or more problems that keep a character from their intended goal.
* Transition. Image, symbol, dialogue, that joins paragraphs and scenes together.
* Flashback. Remembering something that happened before the short story takes place.
* Climax. When the rising action of the story reaches the peak.
* Falling Action. Releasing the action of the story after the climax.
* Resolution. When the internal or external conflict is resolve.

Conflict

Conflict produces tension that makes the story begin. Tension is created by opposition between the character or characters and internal or external forces or conditions. By balancing the opposing forces of the conflict, you keep readers glued to the pages wondering how the story will end.
Possible Conflicts Include:

* The protagonist against another individual
* The protagonist against nature (or technology)
* The protagonist against society
* The protagonist against God
* The protagonist against himself or herself.

Resolution

The solution to the conflict. In short fiction, it is difficult to provide a complete resolution and you often need to just show that characters are beginning to change in some way or starting to see things differently.

Long Interactive Version Can be found at

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[Ace7X]

Well I am adding a list of tips. It's the common problems encountered by writers. Hope you would find this useful. =3 I posted this in another forum and I thought it would be a good way to do it here as well. ^^

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OK so... I was given this English guide book because last year I was really bad at essay-writing and everything, and this guidebook has it all. I found a section about Creative Writing, and I found them most helpful, so I want to share them with you guys. <3 What I found the most helpful however was the ‘Common Mistakes’ section (hence the name), so yeah. This is like tips when you’re in an exam, so I did a wittle bit of tweaking here and there.

I take no full credit from them, since most of these ideas I got from the book, just put it in my own words.

The Common Mistakes in Writing

I know that everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect, after all. However, there are different ways to avoid mistakes, especially in writing. I reckon the best way to avoid those mistakes is to actually list down those mistakes and also list down some ways on how to avoid it.

Common Problem 1: Dialogue

Conversations between characters in a story need to have a purpose. They should add something to the story. Two characters saying ‘hello’ to each other is one example of a poor use of dialogue. I’m not saying that you can’t do it, it’s just not good, unless you added more to that ‘hello’. ;D

From the book is an example of a dialogue.

‘Hi, Fred,’ said Marcia.
‘Hi, Marcia,’ said Fred.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing, what are you doing?’
‘Nothing much,’ says Marcia.
‘Did you see John?’ says Fred.
‘No, Fred,’ said Marcia.
‘Oh, he said that he was going to be here’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ said Fred.
‘What do you wanna do?’ says Marcia.
‘Dunno, what do you wanna do?’ says Fred.
‘Oh, I dunno. Wanna shoot some pool?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay.’

For starters, that was painstaking to type, and I had to press the Enter button like a hundred times. But you should spot many errors in that simple dialogue. If you spotted repetition, kudos to you. But the main problem in this dialogue is the pointless-ness of it all. It could’ve been condensed into just one simple line:

‘Let’s go shoot some pool, Fred.’


How to avoid it:

» Make sure that your dialogue has some essential details. It’s not supposed to be an overtly casual type of conversation, since it would lose the reader’s interest. There’s no use reading 20 lines of nothingness, right?

» Dialogue should develop the character somehow, for example, personality or attitude.

» Say said ten times in one dialogue can put you in the Writing Doomsday List. AKA, it’s really bad. There are other words that you can substitute, such as retorted, asked, replied and you get the gist. You can also add some hints of the character’s feelings/thoughts by saying reacted angrily or she stammered uncontrollably.

Common Problem 2: Poor grammar, syntax and spelling

Imagine if this is a story. What would u feel?

It’s hard to capture the essence of the story if the reader has to practically decode the story that has full of spelling errors, poor sentence structure and lack of punctuations. This is a common error usually of people who are only starting to write, and really, that’s unavoidable. But making it as a habit isn’t OK.


How to avoid it:

» The best solution is to work on it. Spell out words that you frequently misspell. Write out sentences and make sure that they have punctuation. Try and avoid lolcat, because it gives people headaches.

» Microsoft Word is not human. Sure, it can detect some spelling errors and stuff, but it’s not perfectly accurate. For example, their and there. They are two completely different words, and some people mix them up (including me). Sometimes, people say ‘There books are their,’ which doesn’t really make sense.

» Re-read your work. Reading it aloud is even better, as it’s easier for you to detect mistakes that way. Ask someone to proofread your work as well; second opinions don’t hurt.
Common spelling/grammatical errors
» Defiantly, definately and definitely. They are entirely different from each other. For starters, definately is not even a word. Defiantly means ‘reluctantly, hesistantly’. Definitely means ‘certain or precise’. Most people mix up defiantly and definitely. Just to let you know that they don’t have the same meaning.

» A lot is not one word. End of story.

» Lying, not lieing and dying, and dieing. It makes me cringe to look at these words lol. Dyeing is right, though.

» Weather and whether. Weather means sunny and whatever, whether is you know… whether you do this or not.

Writting? What’s that?

Common Problem 3: No plot at all or no characterisation, setting or atmosphere.

Sorry Twilight fans, but this is what I had trouble with while reading that book. It didn’t have a plot. Bella falling in love with Edward and James wanting to eat Bella is not a plot, unfortunately. It also didn’t have any character development. What it has was intense atmosphere, which probably what made it a good book to most people.

A writer must have the following in a story: plot, characterisation, setting, atmosphere and ending. You don’t need to spend an equal amount of time on each, but it’s essential to have those in a story.

How to avoid this

I actually have no tips but to practice. I also learned this from my English teacher: if you want to write a story, you write the very first sentence of the story and the very last sentence of that story. And just fill in the middle. You should know what’s going to happen in your story before you write it.

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I hope some of you aspiring writers and novelists found this helpful as much as I did. ^_^
__________________

[Anoody]

Thank you for the tips .. you really have the experience

[Risuzu]

Or, you could just read Edgar Allen Poe's essay on how to write short stories being that he's the creator of them. Detective ones, anyway.

[Ace7X]

^ can I see one of his tutorials?

How to Write a Short Story

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[Thrive2Mix]

Um. How can you say the twlight books lacked plot? They had plot. Bella falling in love with Edward and then james wanting to eat her was a plot for the first book. Now, it may not be a very good plot, but it was still the plot that drove the book.

Anything can be a plot. (just doesn't mean it's good ^_^)

For example. Jacob had to go the the store before Christmas or he would miss the big sale on the playstation 3. The following story is the what happens. (the plot's not very good, but it's still the story.)


But over all this is a good guide. ^_^

[RinVonStark]

Originally Posted by Thrive2Mix

Um. How can you say the twlight books lacked plot? They had plot. Bella falling in love with Edward and then james wanting to eat her was a plot for the first book. Now, it may not be a very good plot, but it was still the plot that drove the book.

Anything can be a plot. (just doesn't mean it's good ^_^)

For example. Jacob had to go the the store before Christmas or he would miss the big sale on the playstation 3. The following story is the what happens. (the plot's not very good, but it's still the story.)


But over all this is a good guide. ^_^

BUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA lol assplot.

Also, good copy pasta guide ^^

[Ace7X]

^ XD lol

but I am serious, this is a good guide.

*put some cool serious pictures here*

and shouldnt things like this be sticky?

[Risuzu]

Let me see if I can find Poe's essay on it online. I'd prefer not to have to write out the entire thing. Will edit this post later.

EDIT: Here, a link to the thing: [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Ace7X]

^ thanks. will try read them later.